There is an increasing reliance on channels such as web chat, social media, text, and messaging to provide customer care between a customer and an agent of a contact center or company. These channels are proving to be convenient and efficient and facilitate customer care for the benefit of both the customer and the company. As more time is spent getting service over these channels, users can become frustrated when progress takes longer than expected and/or customers get routed to other agents or departments. These are known as “hold” situations in the voice world. In the text world, the “hold” situations only provide silence.
Another issue occurs as the use of non-voice/non-real-time channels continue to grow and the optimization of agent time similarly continues to increase in importance. Prior art optimization of agent time is performed by requiring agents to take on multiple non-voice interactions such as Short Message Service (SMS), email, text, social media, social messaging, etc. An agent may be responsible for juggling as many of these interactions as the agent is able and/or the agent's manager configures for the agent. The pace of one or more conversations is determined by how attentive the agent is to a customer and how quickly the interaction can be handled. However, other optimization may be often overlooked, such as in addressing a specific customer interaction.
Another issue common in the prior art occurs with the increase in customer care delivered over web chat, social media, text, and messaging. These channels are proving to be convenient and efficient channels for customer care benefiting both the customer and the company. However, providing status, progress, and comfort without disrupting the content-bearing part of the conversation. Recording and storing the entirety of a conversation, including non-content messages, wastes storage and processing resources and renders transcriptions more cumbersome and less useful.